There is no trickier subject for a writer from the South than that of affection between a black person and a white one in the unequal world of segregation. For the dishonesty upon which a society is founded makes every emotion suspect, makes it impossible to know whether what flowed between two people was honest feeling or pity or pragmatism.(Howell Raines's Pulitzer Prize winning article "Grady's Gift")-Sockett admired this quote and used it in her summary.

Sorry is the fool who ever underestimates my mother.

Everyone knows how we white people feel, the glorified Mammy figure who dedicates her whole life to a white family. Margaret Mitchell covered that. But no one ever asked Mammy how she felt about it.

I reckon that’s the risk you run, letting somebody else raise you chilluns.

I always order the banned books from a black market dealer in California, figuring if the State of Mississippi banned them, they must be good.

No one tells us, girls who don't go on dates, that remembering can be almost as good as what actually happens.

And why? Because they are suffocating within the lines that define their town and their times. And sometimes lines are made to be crossed.